Some of the world’s brainiest brain experts have put their heads together to try and unravel the human mind.

More than 80 international research institutions are involved and their work won’t just be theoretical, but decidedly hands-on.

Their ultimate aim is to actually build a fully functioning replica of the human brain. It’s about developing a better understanding of what makes us human—and it’s also about creating a new era of smart, efficient computers.

Transcript

Antony Funnell: This is a bit disrespectful I know, but I'm not going to name names so I think I can get away with it. Let's be honest—some people's brains are a bit like old washing-machines; they get the job done, but they rattle around and occasionally stop working.

In general terms, however, the human brain is an incredibly efficient device. And scientists believe if we could fully understood how the brain works, and could mimic it, it would revolutionise the world of computing.

Professor Robert Williams is a neurobiologist at the University of Tennessee Health Science Centre and he's one of a large team of scientists chosen to begin work on the Human Brain Project, a research initiative funded by the European Commission.

Robert Williams: The Human Brain Project has probably been about 10 years in the brewing. It is the brainchild of Professor Henry Markram at the EPFL in Lausanne, Switzerland, and he's been a hard-core electro-physiologist and molecular biologist interested in brain function, but he's also interested in the theory of mind and brain function. And there are really two ways to approach the issue of how the brain and how the mind operate. One is called the top-down approach in which you develop a theory of how you think the brain should work and then you go around and look at behaviours and brain abnormalities and try to see whether your predictions at a high level are borne out by the data. So that's top-down.

The other approach is to start with the nuts and bolts of the brain—neurons, chemicals, genes—and build up gradually from the bottom towards the top, towards the cognitive and even the social domain. And that bottom-up approach is now becoming much more feasible because we have incredible new methods that allow us to look at genes and proteins and the components of the brain—neurons, glial cells and synapses.

So Professor Markram's approach is to acquire as much data as possible at a low level and then gradually build up to a complete simulation of the human brain, and there are obviously a lot of potential steps along the way. You might want to start with a mouse brain rather than a human brain and see how successful you are. And so as a result the Human Brain Project actually does have those two structures. We are looking at mouse brain and human brain, and I should say really 'brains' because the brain of one human is obviously very different from the brain of another and that's true of mice also, and behaviours are different, and so we're interested in both how the brain works but also in how different brains work.

Antony Funnell: And this is an enormous collaboration, isn't it. We're talking about something like 80 different research institutes across the world involved.

Robert Williams: And that's only in the wrap-up phase, so that's in the first 2.5 years in which we get to test our own mettle, and if we do a good job the EU Commission will fund it for another 7.5 years. So if all goes well we're looking at a 10-year collaboration with an initiation with 40 groups and 80 investigators, but we expect that to increase into several hundred investigating teams.

Antony Funnell: And forgive the pun, but we're talking about some of the best brains in the world, aren't we, working on this.

Robert Williams: I hope so. Of course I wouldn't claim that on-air. But we certainly have a broad spectrum of collaborators. It's primarily European, obviously, since the funding is European, but we have significant input from many different countries that aren't part of the EU, but it is a massive international effort.

Antony Funnell: Am I correct in saying that there is really two parts to this; one is to better understand the brain itself, as you've said, but then to also use that understanding to develop better computers in the end.

Robert Williams: Absolutely. So the underlying motivation for the EU to fend this…it's actually been funded by a future emerging technologies component of the EU Commission, so that funding source has been largely responsible for developing technology in the EU. So a major component of this Human Brain Project is actually to exploit some of the design principles of the human brain to devise better software and better hardware for computing and even thinking machines. And the major innovation in terms of the hardware will be something called a neuromorphic chip which is a microprocessor that operates on somewhat different principles than a standard microprocessor. It is a little more like or a lot more like a neuron or an ensemble of neurons. It's not quite as dependent on an oscillator or a clock, and it is able to compute in a more graded or analogue-like fashion than a standard digital computer.

Antony Funnell: But what are the benefits of having computers that operate like a human brain? What sort of difference will that make to computing?

Robert Williams: That's part of the research question. I can tell you what some of the fundamental assumptions are and what we actually know. We know that they should be more efficient in terms of energy consumption. So the human brain is impressive in terms of its efficiency of computation, 20 W to 30 W worth of power operating a human brain, and we're able to do fantastic calculations with that kind of energetic constraint. A typical computer will draw substantially more than that and doesn't do nearly as much as a human brain can do.

The hope is that neuromorphic chips will be far more efficient than the current architecture, and that we'll be able to also do different types of calculations that perhaps we haven't yet…well, we haven't been able to get a regular CPU or even a GPU to perform, a central processing unit or a massively parallel graphic processing unit like are used in game hardware. So those are CPUs and GPUs, that's a current typical architecture for microprocessors. So the neuromorphic chip is sort of a third type of architecture that could be more efficient and might be able to approach human level cognition in the next decade or two.

Antony Funnell: And there's also an objective, isn't there, to use the knowledge that's obtained to build better robotics as well as better computing systems.

Robert Williams: Yes, absolutely. The robotics really can happen in two domains. You can actually have a physical implementation of a robot and then you can have a virtual implementation of a robot, and I think initially in the Human Brain Project there will be both but there will be an unusually extensive focus on virtual robotics, understanding how the simulated brain can drive a virtual robot. That's a little bit more efficient right now than it is to actually physically build robots. But again, as I said, the Human Brain Project does have both components.

Antony Funnell: One of the hot topics at the moment is artificial intelligence. I take it that this would actually increase our understanding of artificial intelligence and be a boon for that field.

Robert Williams: That is certainly one of the hopes. General artificial intelligence is one of those topics that has been talked about and even hyped over the last 50 years. It's almost one of those topics you don't talk about in polite company. But we definitely hope to make a significant contribution to the infrastructure of artificial intelligence.

Antony Funnell: And just to be clear for the audience, 'artificial intelligence' being making machines much more intelligent, much more thinking in the way they operate.

Robert Williams: And hopefully even semiautonomous and able to be motivated. We obviously have made impressive progress in devising methods to compute the right chess move. IBM certainly demonstrated that they were able to beat Kasparov at chess, but we need much more than that if we're really going to achieve what's referred to as general artificial intelligence. So a chess program is artificially intelligent but it is not generally intelligent, and many of your listeners will have heard of the Turing test; can you distinguish the difference between a computer answering a typed query, and a human? And computers are still not great at passing the Turing test.

Antony Funnell: Right back at the beginning of this interview we mentioned that it was a massive scientific collaboration. How will the coordination of this be undertaken?

Robert Williams: Well, I can tell you how the coordination has worked leading up to the application, and that has also been a massive effort. So there's quite a bit of funding that is required simply to get people to communicate effectively, to change their ideas, to adjust, and then there has to be some judicious amount of top-down management, which is anathema to most scientists. So most of us like to work in our labs, we like our autonomy, we like being our own bosses, and that's why we get into this field.

In a case like this where you're running a large concerted effort with a specific set of goals, scientists have to come to terms with the fact that they are part of a team, so a special effort has to be devoted to that integration. It's going to be interesting to see how that works, but I can tell you that Henry Markram and colleagues are brilliant at this. We sometimes joke about herding cats, that dealing with scientists is like herding cats. Henry has proven to be great at herding lions because a lot of the people that he has to deal with, it really takes a lion trainer to handle them appropriately.

Antony Funnell: We've talked about the science side of this, but what are the moral and ethical considerations here? Because if we eventually end up with a very complex understanding of the human brain and can build robots and computers that mimic the human brain's functions, one would imagine there will be people who will be concerned about that.

Robert Williams: Right. So one entire effort that's part of the Human Brain Project is a neuro-ethics component. It has substantial funding, and the leader of it is a very senior neuroscientist from France, Jean-Pierre Changeux. He made many seminal discoveries in molecular science and neurobiology in the '60s and '70s, and he is now in charge of the neuro-ethics or the ethics of the Human Brain Project and the implications of what we're doing, and he has quite a large team, and they're trying to think through the implications of this work. Obviously there's a lot of interest that will be in the same area outside of the Human Brain Project, so we are aware of it, we'll be covering it, and we will be soliciting input and concerns and trying to figure out good solutions.

Antony Funnell: Well, Professor Robert Williams, neurobiologist at the University of Tennessee Health Science Centre, thank you very much for joining us on Future Tense.

Antony Funnell: Now, when we next meet we'll be talking about the ultimate in space endurance, packing your bags for a trip to another solar system, a journey that with current technology would take something like 70,000 years.

Apollo 11 launch: We have a lift-off, 32 minutes past the hour. Lift-off on Apollo 11…

Antony Funnell: Obviously we're going to have to find a few shortcuts.

Among our guests will be former astronaut Mae Jemison.

Mae Jemison: We talk about 100-Year Starship or going to another solar system within the next 100 years as a grand challenge. Figuring it out is a grand challenge. It means that we can no longer think just small baby steps, we have to figure out how to jump completely outside the box and view things very, very differently.